'Kidney for sale': Iran has a legal market for the organs, but the system doesn't always work
TEHRAN - The advertisements are scrawled in marker on brick walls and tree trunks, and affixed to telephone utility boxes, sidewalks and a road sign pointing the way to one of Iran's leading hospitals.
"Kidney for sale," read the dozens of messages, accompanied by phone numbers and blood types, splashed along a tree-lined street opposite the Hasheminejad Kidney Center in Tehran.
New ads appear almost daily. Behind each is a tale of individual woe - joblessness, debt, a family emergency - in a country beset by economic despair.
"If I could sell my kidney, I could get out of debt," Ali Rezaei, a bankrupt 42-year-old air-conditioning installer, said in the shade of a tree across from the kidney hospital. "I would sell my liver too."
In fact, Iran offers people a legal way to sell their kidneys - and is the only country in the world to do so. A government foundation registers buyers and sellers, matches them up and sets a fixed price of $4,600 per organ. Since 1993, doctors in Iran have performed more than 30,000 kidney transplants this way.
